The White Slavery Panic — a phantom conspiracy that wrote itself into federal law

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the United States convinced itself that a vast, organized conspiracy — most often imagined as run by foreigners — was abducting innocent young white women off the streets, drugging them, and forcing them into prostitution by the tens of thousands. The fear, known as the “white slavery” panic, peaked between roughly 1907 and 1914. It filled newspapers, pamphlets, lurid books, stage plays, and eventually films; it produced vice commissions in dozens of cities; and on 25 June 1910 it produced a federal law, the White-Slave Traffic Act — the Mann Act — signed by President William Howard Taft and named for its sponsor, Representative James Robert Mann of Illinois, which made it a felony to transport a woman across state lines for prostitution or “any other immoral purpose.”

The outcome is established by the historical record. The sensational version of the threat — a coordinated, immigrant-controlled syndicate kidnapping respectable women into sexual slavery — did not exist. Prostitution was real and widespread, but the investigations meant to prove the conspiracy instead disproved it. A 1910 federal grand jury in New York convened with John D. Rockefeller Jr. as foreman found no evidence of any organized white-slave traffic; city vice commissions, including Chicago’s influential 1911 report, documented extensive prostitution that was overwhelmingly local, commercially disorganized, and entered into for economic reasons rather than by abduction. Historians since have estimated that genuine coercion accounted for only a small fraction of cases — on one widely cited reckoning, well under ten percent.

This dossier treats the panic as a closed case: a moral panic whose factual core was tiny and whose cultural force was enormous. It subsided as a fever within a few years, discredited by its own commissions and overtaken by the First World War. But it left durable residue — a federal law that long outlived the fear that created it, and that was repeatedly turned to purposes its authors never named, most notoriously the 1913 prosecution of the Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson for his relationships with white women.